Robyn

No, I am not talking about my pet dragon…

It is a speech recognition program, for those of you who are not familiar with it. A large part of what I do on a daily basis is write.  I hear it, “But you LOVE writing, don’t you?”  Yes, and no.  Yes, I love the creativity of writing. No, I hate the monotony of writing.

Part of what I am doing to help earn our living is internet marketing. I end up writing a slew of articles all about one topic. It is not fantasy. It is not fiction (well…sometimes, maybe it is a little bit. I’ll tell you about that later.) It gets downright boring at times. I mean, how many words can you spend writing about doggie strollers?  After a time you actually do run out of things to say, especially if there aren’t any newly released, six wheeled doggie strollers to post about.  I don’t know how many words a day I would end up typing, maybe an average of 3,000 or so, with that number sometimes going up.  Now, that’s fine for a Nanowrimo month, but day in and day out, it translates into a fair amount of pounding the keyboard. Right now my “N” key is taking a bit of a beating, and it is fading.

Enter a dictation program called “Dragon Naturally Speaking”.  I speak into a microphone and the computer types out the sentences.  I am going back and forth with using it, sometimes I am more inclined to do so than others. I do end up with some odd word combinations at times as it does have a tendency to misunderstand words at times. You have to train it to understand what you are saying, and that can get a little tedious. On the plus side, it has helped me to churn out some great, longer articles and has given my poor fingers a break from typing.

I am not convinced that I will use it all the time, but it is both a time saver and a finger saver at times and it relieves the monotony of typing everything. Plus, I also seem to be a bit more creative when I am speaking, as opposed to when I am merely typing.  (Right now I am typing, not speaking.)